Drew Kennedy’s easy-going country & Americana

My first encounter with New Braunfels Americana singer/songwriter Drew Kennedy came from the Norwegian blog Musikkbloggen, which Google helpfully translated from Norsk to English.

“Drew Kennedy has made an album that is incredible comfortable on the ear,” read Google’s undoubtedly spot-on translation. After listening to the album in question — 2011’s Fresh Water in the Salton Sea — I’m inclined to agree.

Unlike the four albums Kennedy released before it, this album came with a companion piece, a novel that follows the adventures of singer/songwriter Dan Murphy. In the novel, Murphy embarks on standard touring musician adventures.

All hilarious Norsk translations aside, Kennedy’s brand of Texas country-meets-Americana is sweet, nuanced and filled with all the folklore Americana fans love. Kennedy plays Stingaree on Thursday night and I talked to the singer/songwriter about his influences and what it’s like to create a book and album that work in tandem with each other:

Q Last November you released an album and novel, both titled “Fresh Water in the Salton Sea.” Is the novel a companion piece to the album? A The book follows a fictional songwriter on a solo tour of the west. After every five or six chapters in the book, the reader is presented with the lyrics of a song. If I did my job as an author, the reader should be able to recognize the inspiration behind that song from the contents of the previous chapters.

There are 10 songs in the book — they’re the same 10 songs that are on the album. Additionally, I narrated an audiobook of the novel where we included the songs from the album rather than just narrating the lyrics, thus bringing the two projects together in one seamless piece.

Q What songwriters influenced your style early on when you got into country music in college? A Early on my biggest influences were Walt Wilkins, Robert Earl Keen, Roger Miller, and Chris Knight

Q How does Fresh Water in the Salton Sea differ from the four albums you released before it? A Hopefully it shows my continued growth as a writer and as an artist. It also marked the first time I handled a majority of the production on an album. I think it’s the most cohesive record, both sonically and lyrically, that I’ve ever released.

Q What kind of parallels have you seen between writing an album of this nature and writing a novel? A The novel allowed for me to exercise more of my creativity via prose without the confines of the structural nature of songwriting.

Beyond that, though, you’re really doing the same thing — creating characters and plot lines, and you do the best that you can to make those things as interesting and engaging as possible given the overall structure you’re working in.